OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Deep Learning based Pedestrian Inertial Navigation: Methods, Dataset and On-Device Inference
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

Modern inertial measurements units (IMUs) are small, cheap, energy efficient, and widely employed in smart devices and mobile robots. Exploiting inertial data for accurate and reliable pedestrian navigation supports is a key component for emerging Internet-of-Things applications and services. Recently, there has been a growing interest in applying deep neural networks (DNNs) to motion sensing and location estimation. However, the lack of sufficient labelled data for training and evaluating architecture benchmarks has limited the adoption of DNNs in IMU-based tasks. In this paper, we present and release the Oxford Inertial Odometry Dataset (OxIOD), a first-of-its-kind public dataset for deep learning based inertial navigation research, with fine-grained ground-truth on all sequences. Furthermore, to enable more efficient inference at the edge, we propose a novel lightweight framework to learn and reconstruct pedestrian trajectories from raw IMU data. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our dataset and methods in achieving accurate data-driven pedestrian inertial navigation on resource-constrained devices.
Modeling of Pruning Techniques for Deep Neural Networks Simplification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) suffer from different issues, such as computational complexity and the number of parameters. In recent years pruning techniques are employed to reduce the number of operations and model size in CNNs. Different pruning methods are proposed, which are based on pruning the connections, channels, and filters. Various techniques and tricks accompany pruning methods, and there is not a unifying framework to model all the pruning methods. In this paper pruning methods are investigated, and a general model which is contained the majority of pruning techniques is proposed. The advantages and disadvantages of the pruning methods can be identified, and all of them can be summarized under this model. The final goal of this model is to provide a general approach for all of the pruning methods with different structures and applications.
Montage: A Neural Network Language Model-Guided JavaScript Engine Fuzzer
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

JavaScript (JS) engine vulnerabilities pose significant security threats affecting billions of web browsers. While fuzzing is a prevalent technique for finding such vulnerabilities, there have been few studies that leverage the recent advances in neural network language models (NNLMs). In this paper, we present Montage, the first NNLM-guided fuzzer for finding JS engine vulnerabilities. The key aspect of our technique is to transform a JS abstract syntax tree (AST) into a sequence of AST subtrees that can directly train prevailing NNLMs. We demonstrate that Montage is capable of generating valid JS tests, and show that it outperforms previous studies in terms of finding vulnerabilities. Montage found 37 real-world bugs, including three CVEs, in the latest JS engines, demonstrating its efficacy in finding JS engine bugs.
'I Just Want to Hack Myself to Not Get Distracted': Evaluating Design Interventions for Self-Control on Facebook
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2020
Year: 2020

Beyond being the world's largest social network, Facebook is for many also one of its greatest sources of digital distraction. For students, problematic use has been associated with negative effects on academic achievement and general wellbeing. To understand what strategies could help users regain control, we investigated how simple interventions to the Facebook UI affect behaviour and perceived control. We assigned 58 university students to one of three interventions: goal reminders, removed newsfeed, or white background (control). We logged use for 6 weeks, applied interventions in the middle weeks, and administered fortnightly surveys. Both goal reminders and removed newsfeed helped participants stay on task and avoid distraction. However, goal reminders were often annoying, and removing the newsfeed made some fear missing out on information. Our findings point to future interventions such as controls for adjusting types and amount of available information, and flexible blocking which matches individual definitions of 'distraction'.
A logic-based relational learning approach to relation extraction: The OntoILPER system
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

Relation Extraction (RE), the task of detecting and characterizing semantic relations between entities in text, has gained much importance in the last two decades, mainly in the biomedical domain. Many papers have been published on Relation Extraction using supervised machine learning techniques. Most of these techniques rely on statistical methods, such as feature-based and tree-kernels-based methods. Such statistical learning techniques are usually based on a propositional hypothesis space for representing examples, i.e., they employ an attribute-value representation of features. This kind of representation has some drawbacks, particularly in the extraction of complex relations which demand more contextual information about the involving instances, i.e., it is not able to effectively capture structural information from parse trees without loss of information. In this work, we present OntoILPER, a logic-based relational learning approach to Relation Extraction that uses Inductive Logic Programming for generating extraction models in the form of symbolic extraction rules. OntoILPER takes profit of a rich relational representation of examples, which can alleviate the aforementioned drawbacks. The proposed relational approach seems to be more suitable for Relation Extraction than statistical ones for several reasons that we argue. Moreover, OntoILPER uses a domain ontology that guides the background knowledge generation process and is used for storing the extracted relation instances. The induced extraction rules were evaluated on three protein-protein interaction datasets from the biomedical domain. The performance of OntoILPER extraction models was compared with other state-of-the-art RE systems. The encouraging results seem to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution.
Towards High Performance Java-based Deep Learning Frameworks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

The advent of modern cloud services along with the huge volume of data produced on a daily basis, have set the demand for fast and efficient data processing. This demand is common among numerous application domains, such as deep learning, data mining, and computer vision. Prior research has focused on employing hardware accelerators as a means to overcome this inefficiency. This trend has driven software development to target heterogeneous execution, and several modern computing systems have incorporated a mixture of diverse computing components, including GPUs and FPGAs. However, the specialization of the applications' code for heterogeneous execution is not a trivial task, as it requires developers to have hardware expertise in order to obtain high performance. The vast majority of the existing deep learning frameworks that support heterogeneous acceleration, rely on the implementation of wrapper calls from a high-level programming language to a low-level accelerator backend, such as OpenCL, CUDA or HLS. In this paper we have employed TornadoVM, a state-of-the-art heterogeneous programming framework to transparently accelerate Deep Netts; a Java-based deep learning framework. Our initial results demonstrate up to 8x performance speedup when executing the back propagation process of the network's training on AMD GPUs against the sequential execution of the original Deep Netts framework.
Unsourced Multiuser Sparse Regression Codes achieve the Symmetric MAC Capacity
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

Unsourced random-access (U-RA) is a type of grant-free random access with a virtually unlimited number of users, of which only a certain number $K_a$ are active on the same time slot. Users employ exactly the same codebook, and the task of the receiver is to decode the list of transmitted messages. Recently a concatenated coding construction for U-RA on the AWGN channel was presented, in which a sparse regression code (SPARC) is used as an inner code to create an effective outer OR-channel. Then an outer code is used to resolve the multiple-access interference in the OR-MAC. In this work we show that this concatenated construction can achieve a vanishing per-user error probability in the limit of large blocklength and a large number of active users at sum-rates up to the symmetric Shannon capacity, i.e. as long as $K_aR < 0.5\log_2(1+K_a\SNR)$. This extends previous point-to-point optimality results about SPARCs to the unsourced multiuser scenario. Additionally, we calculate the algorithmic threshold, that is a bound on the sum-rate up to which the inner decoding can be done reliably with the low-complexity AMP algorithm.
An extended quantum process algebra (eQPAlg) approach for distributed quantum systems
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2020
Year: 2020

In this work, we have expounded the communication procedure of quantum systems by means of process algebra. The main objective of our research effort is to formally represent the communication between distributed quantum systems. In this new proposed communication model we have ameliorated the existing rules of Lalire's quantum process algebra QPAlg. We have brought some important modification in QPAlg by introducing the concept of formally specifying the Quantum teleportation protocol. We have further introduced the formal description of protocol by using programs that best explains its working and satisfies the specification. Examples have been provided to describe the working of the improved algebra that formally explain the sending and receiving of both classical as well as quantum data, keeping in mind the principal features of quantum mechanics.
Parameter-Efficient Transfer from Sequential Behaviors for User Modeling and Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2020
Year: 2020

Inductive transfer learning has had a big impact on computer vision and NLP domains but has not been used in the area of recommender systems. Even though there has been a large body of research on generating recommendations based on modeling user-item interaction sequences, few of them attempt to represent and transfer these models for serving downstream tasks where only limited data exists. In this paper, we delve on the task of effectively learning a single user representation that can be applied to a diversity of tasks, from cross-domain recommendations to user profile predictions. Fine-tuning a large pre-trained network and adapting it to downstream tasks is an effective way to solve such tasks. However, fine-tuning is parameter inefficient considering that an entire model needs to be re-trained for every new task. To overcome this issue, we develop a parameter efficient transfer learning architecture, termed as PeterRec, which can be configured on-the-fly to various downstream tasks. Specifically, PeterRec allows the pre-trained parameters to remain unaltered during fine-tuning by injecting a series of re-learned neural networks, which are small but as expressive as learning the entire network. We perform extensive experimental ablation to show the effectiveness of the learned user representation in five downstream tasks. Moreover, we show that PeterRec performs efficient transfer learning in multiple domains, where it achieves comparable or sometimes better performance relative to fine-tuning the entire model parameters. Codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/fajieyuan/sigir2020_peterrec.
Perspectives and Ethics of the Autonomous Artificial Thinking Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

The feasibility of autonomous artificial thinking systems needs to compare the way the human beings acquire their information and develops the thought with the current capacities of the autonomous information systems. Our model uses four hierarchies: the hierarchy of information systems, the cognitive hierarchy, the linguistic hierarchy and the digital informative hierarchy that combines artificial intelligence, the power of computers models, methods and tools to develop autonomous information systems. The question of the capability of autonomous system to provide a form of artificial thought arises with the ethical consequences on the social life and the perspective of transhumanism.
Prediction of flow characteristics in the bubble column reactor by the artificial pheromone-based communication of biological ants
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

In order to perceive the behavior presented by the multiphase chemical reactors, the ant colony optimization algorithm was combined with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) data. This intelligent algorithm creates a probabilistic technique for computing flow and it can predict various levels of three-dimensional bubble column reactor (BCR). This artificial ant algorithm is mimicking real ant behavior. This method can anticipate the flow characteristics in the reactor using almost 30 % of the whole data in the domain. Following discovering the suitable parameters, the method is used for predicting the points not being simulated with CFD, which represent mesh refinement of Ant colony method. In addition, it is possible to anticipate the bubble-column reactors in the absence of numerical results or training of exact values of evaluated data. The major benefits include reduced computational costs and time savings. The results show a great agreement between ant colony prediction and CFD outputs in different sections of the BCR. The combination of ant colony system and neural network framework can provide the smart structure to estimate biological and nature physics base phenomena. The ant colony optimization algorithm (ACO) framework based on ant behavior can solve all local mathematical answers throughout 3D bubble column reactor. The integration of all local answers can provide the overall solution in the reactor for different characteristics. This new overview of modelling can illustrate new sight into biological behavior in nature.
Extraction of Relevant Images for Boilerplate Removal in Web Browsers
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2020
Year: 2020

Boilerplate refers to unwanted and repeated parts of a webpage (such as ads or table of contents) that distracts the user from reading the core content of the webpage, such as a news article. Accurate detection and removal of boilerplate content from a webpage can enable the users to have a clutter free view of the webpage or news article. This can be useful in features like reader mode in web browsers. Current implementations of reader mode in web browsers such as Firefox, Chrome and Edge perform reasonably well for textual content in webpages. However, they are mostly heuristic based and not flexible when the webpage content is dynamic. Also they often do not perform well for removing boilerplate content in the form of images and multimedia in webpages. For detection of boilerplate images, one needs to have knowledge of the actual layout of the images in the webpage, which is only possible when the webpage is rendered. In this paper we discuss some of the issues in relevant image extraction. We also present the design of a testing framework to measure accuracy and a classifier to extract relevant images by leveraging a headless browser solution that gives the rendering information for images.
CLUENER2020: Fine-grained Named Entity Recognition Dataset and Benchmark for Chinese
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we introduce the NER dataset from CLUE organization (CLUENER2020), a well-defined fine-grained dataset for named entity recognition in Chinese. CLUENER2020 contains 10 categories. Apart from common labels like person, organization, and location, it contains more diverse categories. It is more challenging than current other Chinese NER datasets and could better reflect real-world applications. For comparison, we implement several state-of-the-art baselines as sequence labeling tasks and report human performance, as well as its analysis. To facilitate future work on fine-grained NER for Chinese, we release our dataset, baselines, and leader-board.
Button Simulation and Design via FDVV Models
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2020
Year: 2020

Designing a push-button with desired sensation and performance is challenging because the mechanical construction must have the right response characteristics. Physical simulation of a button's force-displacement (FD) response has been studied to facilitate prototyping; however, the simulations' scope and realism have been limited. In this paper, we extend FD modeling to include vibration (V) and velocity-dependence characteristics (V). The resulting FDVV models better capture tactility characteristics of buttons, including snap. They increase the range of simulated buttons and the perceived realism relative to FD models. The paper also demonstrates methods for obtaining these models, editing them, and simulating accordingly. This end-to-end approach enables the analysis, prototyping, and optimization of buttons, and supports exploring designs that would be hard to implement mechanically.
SMT-based Robot Transition Repair
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

State machines are a common model for robot behaviors. Transition functions often rely on parameterized conditions to model preconditions for the controllers, where the correct values of the parameters depend on factors relating to the environment or the specific robot. In the absence of specific calibration procedures a roboticist must painstakingly adjust the parameters through a series of trial and error experiments. In this process, identifying when the robot has taken an incorrect action, and what should be done is straightforward, but finding the right parameter values can be difficult. We present an alternative approach that we call, interactive SMT-based Robot Transition Repair. During execution we record an execution trace of the transition function, and we ask the roboticist to identify a few instances where the robot has transitioned incorrectly, and what the correct transition should have been. A user supplies these corrections based on the type of error to repair, and an automated analysis of the traces partially evaluates the transition function for each correction. This system of constraints is then formulated as a MaxSMT problem, where the solution is a minimal adjustment to the parameters that satisfies the maximum number of constraints. In order to identify a repair that accurately captures user intentions and generalizes to novel scenarios, solutions are explored by iteratively adding constraints to the MaxSMT problem to yield sets of alternative repairs. We test with state machines from multiple domains including robot soccer and autonomous driving, and we evaluate solver based repair with respect to solver choice and optimization hyperparameters. Our results demonstrate that SRTR can repair a variety of states machines and error types 1) quickly, 2) with small numbers of corrections, while 3) not overcorrecting state machines and harming generalized performance.
Maintaining Data Integrity in Fog Computing Based Critical Infrastructure Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

The evolution of the utilization of technologies in nearly all aspects of life has produced an enormous amount of data essential in a smart city. Therefore, maximizing the benefits of technologies such as cloud computing, fog computing, and the Internet of things is important to manage and manipulate data in smart cities. However, certain types of data are sensitive and risky and may be infiltrated by malicious attacks. As a result, such data may be corrupted, thereby causing concern. The damage inflicted by an attacker on a set of data can spread through an entire database. Valid transactions that have read corrupted data can update other data items based on the values read. In this study, we introduce a unique model that uses fog computing in smart cities to manage utility service companies and consumer data. We also propose a novel technique to assess damage to data caused by an attack. Thus, original data can be recovered, and a database can be returned to its consistent state as no attacking has occurred.
CHIPKIT: An agile, reusable open-source framework for rapid test chip development
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2020
Year: 2020

The current trend for domain-specific architectures (DSAs) has led to renewed interest in research test chips to demonstrate new specialized hardware. Tape-outs also offer huge pedagogical value garnered from real hands-on exposure to the whole system stack. However, successful tape-outs demand hard-earned experience, and the design process is time consuming and fraught with challenges. Therefore, custom chips have remained the preserve of a small number of research groups, typically focused on circuit design research. This paper describes the CHIPKIT framework. We describe a reusable SoC subsystem which provides basic IO, an on-chip programmable host, memory and peripherals. This subsystem can be readily extended with new IP blocks to generate custom test chips. We also present an agile RTL development flow, including a code generation tool calledVGEN. Finally, we outline best practices for full-chip validation across the entire design cycle.
Security Vetting Process of Smart-home Assistant Applications: A First Look and Case Studies
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

The popularity of smart-home assistant systems such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home leads to a booming third-party application market (over 70,000 applications across the two stores). While existing works have revealed security issues in these systems, it is not well understood how to help application developers to enforce security requirements. In this paper, we perform a preliminary case study to examine the security vetting mechanisms adopted by Amazon Alexa and Google Home app stores. With a focus on the authentication mechanisms between Alexa/Google cloud and third-party application servers (i.e. endpoints), we show the current security vetting is insufficient as developer mistakes can not be effectively detected and notified. A weak authentication would allow attackers to spoof the cloud to insert/retrieve data into/from the application endpoints. We validate the attack through ethical proof-of-concept experiments. To confirm vulnerable applications have indeed passed the security vetting and entered the markets, we develop a heuristic-based searching method. We find 219 real-world Alexa endpoints that carry the vulnerability, many of which are related to critical applications that control smart home devices and electronic cars. We have notified Amazon and Google about our findings and offered our suggestions to mitigate the issue.
Topology-Aware Cooperative Data Protection in Blockchain-Based Decentralized Storage Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

From currency to cloud storage systems, the continuous rise of the blockchain technology is moving various information systems towards decentralization. Blockchain-based decentralized storage networks (DSNs) offer significantly higher privacy and lower costs to customers compared with centralized cloud storage associated with specific vendors. Coding is required in order to retrieve data stored on failing components. While coding solutions for centralized storage have been intensely studied, topology-aware coding for heterogeneous DSNs have not yet been discussed. In this paper, we propose a joint coding scheme where each node receives extra protection through the cooperation with nodes in its neighborhood in a heterogeneous DSN with any given topology. As an extension of, which also subsumes, our prior work on coding for centralized cloud storage, our proposed construction preserves desirable properties such as scalability and flexibility in networks with varying topologies.